Guy made it clear we were going to do something called Holmes Vision. You see Holmes’ vision of a punch before he delivers it and then you see the real thing. For the slow-motion fighting scenes, Guy used to tell me to try a take where I was punching through peanut butter.

In Ritchie's movie, as in the books by creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes is an accomplished bare-knuckle boxer, something Ritchie had experience shooting previously in Snatch with Brad Pitt's memorable "pikey" character. For his part, Downey, Jr. said that portraying Holmes as a brawler wasn't much of a stretch for him as an actor.

I’ve been studying martial arts for the past six years and love bare-knuckle boxing. This was just a choreographed version of what I know how to do.